I hacked into the worst e-bike and fixed it [video](youtube.com) |
I hacked into the worst e-bike and fixed it [video](youtube.com) |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAsuk8OndHs&list=PL5S7V5NhM8...
They're so well done. Sadly, he doesn't do them anymore because Youtube's algorithm doesn't make it worth his while. Evidently, he gets the same traffic & revenue from a 10 minute video reviewing "stupid bike gadgets" into the camera as he does for spending a month building a cool bike jump and editing together one of those amazing videos on the playlist.
If youtube rewarded evergreen stuff like that instead of cheap "reaction" videos, it'd be a much cooler place.
"the Algoirithm" often gets sited, but it's often a youtuber's interaction with thier audience, the pressure to keep up with demand, rising success and not wanting to miss out.
I watch photography videos on YouTube, and camera review channels consistently have far more subscribers than channels who make content about taking photos. (Or at least they did in the past - in recent years camera tech has really matured and interesting releases are much less frequent, and reviewers seem to have taken a hit).
I think people just like gear. Should YouTube not show people what they like to see?
I've watched some Berm Peak videos in the past and I mostly know the channel for its videos about builds/repairs, or his video about the history of valves. The mountain biking videos are good too, but only hold my interest for so long. If I want to see mountain biking I'm more likely to look at some of the stuff Red Bull is putting out.
There the summary of the discussion was: Our core demographic are 60 to 70 year olds which is why we only make shows that appeal to 60-70 year olds and our core audience watches TV while doing household chores, so it needs to be simple to follow, so they can do household chores while watching.
I told them that to me this sounds a lot like circular logic, where they justify the things they are doing with the outcomes that produced. It is obvious there are other markets targeting different audiences (e.g. the likes of Netflix have been explicitly mentioned) and these markets are growing based on the way demographics shift.
A bit like a drug dealer that says he can't do honest work since all his customers are drug addicts, they are using the status quo as an excuse to persist the status quo.
The real way to think about these things is to consider them feedback loops. If all your content targets a specific demographic of course you're gonna have more audience members of that demographic, which again leads you to make more content for said demographic, which leads to more audience members of that demographic which... Until you hit some systemic limit, e.g. you have saturated the market or it turns out your content isn't that appealing to begin with in comparison to other stuff.
That means if you want to be strategic about this you need to give incentives to creators to produce stuff for audiences you don't already have. Even better: you need to become a partner these creators can and want to trust in.
These are the levers YouTube needs to pull if they want to stay a relevant platform that people enjoy spending their time on.
The thing is, "what people enjoy while watching", "what they derive lasting benefit, memory or happiness from", and "what they click on in a thumbnail" are three different things, and youtube optimizes for the latter. Which is why youtube face is a thing.
For this particular channel, I watched a bunch of his videos on this Reevo bike In January 2025, and a lot of bike/cycling related videos in general. Despite this clear preference to guide the algorithm, Youtube stopped recommending this channel to me. It disappeared from my feed.
I always suspected Youtube "motivates" creators to pay for promotion by giving them a taste for free, how it looks like to be on everyone's feed, and then takes them off.
I always got garbage even if it suggested things I wanted to watch too.
The best way is to disable suggestions completely and then just make a note of your favourite channels. That way you get a completely blank landing page and are forced to search out exactly what you want every time.
Whether they achieve that goal or not is a different story.
I didn’t read the rest of your comment but it’s the fault of the algorithm because that tail wags the dog. It’s physically impossible to watch all videos so we are all at the mercy of the (a) algorithm.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5S7V5NhM8JSm7EK8IYTS...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5S7V5NhM8JRuAMsVEQ_3...
Kudos to Seth for cracking the control on the bike, just so we can reclaim control of an appliance that we paid for with our own money, one that won't work because the maker can't be arsed enough to make it work without a mobile app.
Related: Cory Doctorow's [Unauthorized Bread](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...)
- do NOT buy an e-bike with custom parts, no matter how "cool" it is!
I bought a CowBoy years ago and honestly, it was great. Until it wasn't. Inexorably, it does not matter how good the parts are, how well designed it is, wear and tear WILL create problems. You WILL need to replace parts. If nobody but the company making the bike sell them you will get in trouble. It's the same with the App, if it's not open source relying on standard AND with existing, not upcoming, GadgetBrige support they will stop supporting your bike and brick it.
Please, pretty please, as consumers who expect to keep on maintaining your bike over years, ASK your repair shop what THEY think is a good bike to fix. Not what is a good bike to ride.
PS: I now ride a Fixie because screw CowBoy and all those e-bike startups who believe they are the new Apple. They aren't and I was the one paying for their delusion.
edit:
Actually the comment the creator left on the video is almost purely AI and is just as yuicky to read: "There are lots of questions about runaway Reevo mode, and it's a fun topic. Let's go deeper. First of all, I did add a "PAS Timeout" that turns off PAS after a few minutes, and is selectable in the menu. If you set this up from my Github repo, that feature is active. A lot of you also suggested a weight sensor on the seat, but that would disable pedal assist if you stood up out of the saddle, which is when you would need it most. Another suggestion was the dead man switch. That one would work! This is all fun to think about, so keep the ideas coming. I just MIGHT get another Reevo for myself."
I guess I won't be riding them anytime soon. But I am glad to know there is a way to resurrect/improve them!
With his platform he could easily find a person (or a couple) who could do this work themselves, not only saving him money, but nerdsniping someone into hacking a bike. A win-win for everybody.
The thing is an absolute tank - the only parts I've had replace are the tires and brake pads. And the design is really simple with all of the consumable parts being easy to replace. At about $1,400 USD, it's not cheap, but I'm shocked at how long it's lasted and how little maintanence it's needed.
Definitely not "cool" - but one of the best purchases I've ever made.
Now of course there are areas you can make trade offs. A lot of people like MacBooks despite them not supporting other operating systems very well and Apple still mostly being hardasses about outside repair, but they come with good performance and battery life.
Making sure to keep maintainability in mind when making a product decision is critical to making an informed purchase.
i have a e-scooter and judging by the decompiled code it's some sort of chinese e-scooter reskinned by a european company. I know the app is not going to be around for long, so I slowly been trying to make my own.
With a conversion kit? ^_^
So no, I bought an entry level single speed where you can flip the back wheel as fixed gear or just free wheel. I wasn't sure I would stick to Fixie... but it's been months now and I don't remember ever considered going back.
PS: this model https://www.decathlon.be/fr/p/velo-ville-single-speed-500-gr... for ~275€
Fixies are the way to go. Less parts, less things to break. Very Unix-y.
I’ll take my mechanical advantage with gearing.
This sort of thing exactly aligned with the promise of AI (and every "automation advancement" since the dawn of time)! It's another layer of abstraction that allows less technical people to do the thing.
It's impossible to do anything on the internet without someone in the peanut gallery telling you you are doing something wrong.
As someone who does know how to code, I find the approach to be great, as it can motivate others to try similar projects.
There are two ways that I've noticed though that YouTube tends to consistently suggest older videos. One is when you first discover a new channel that you like and watch a few videos from that channel, YouTube will start recommending older videos from that channel until you've exhausted the back catalog (or lost interest).
The other way I've noticed is that when I hit the like button a video, YouTube will recommend it to me again after some time has passed. This also seems to depend on the type of video. Music videos are almost always recommended again after some time, while news videos almost never are.
I think these mechanisms are effective at driving traffic to older videos. If I look at my home page right now, most of it does tend to be newer content, but I'd estimate about 25% of it is more than a year old.
In response to your complaint about Berm Peak videos disappearing from your feed - obviously I don't know for certain, but is it possible that YouTube did suggest other Berm Peak videos after you watched a bunch of Reevo videos - but you didn't watch them? And that YouTube might have interpreted that as a lack of interest in the channel?
I've got a couple of channels that I consistently watch whenever they put out a new video. And I find that YouTube is really good about putting their videos at the top of my home page whenever a new video comes out.
There are a bunch of other channels out there too that I watch from time to time, but I think the above are the best in their respective categories.
Its nuanced, part safety, partly that its a tonne of work to produce good content when you can simply switch to fluff pieces like Berm Peak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNiCtWoGonw
"The Algorithm" doesn't reward hard work, imho part of the math is our short attention spans... there's only so many time you can watch someone else vlog from a sprinter in Squamish.
They made an inexhaustible supply of content that induces dopamine, monetized it, and they demonize it as well, claiming they are innocent because if we didn't want it we wouldn't use it.
Yeah, and drug dealers wouldn't sell drugs if people didn't want them either.
It is evil, but shiny in a way that makes it not seem so.
The guy is not a software/embedded engineer. He's a bike engineer. He doesn't want to code more than needed to get his idea working. As for reverse engineering, he did plenty of it. He soldered the serial interface into the board, fired up a serial terminal, watch the output & note down the data sent through the wire for each event on the bike. Two things he used LLM for: - Work through the decompiled app & find the commands for controlling the bike - Write an app to run on the CYD.
What would be the things he would have needed to do face if he had somebody work on this project instead of Claude: - Find somebody in his close vicinity, and have him over the workshop everyday, because this project requires access to the hardware. - If he instead found somebody else with another Revo bike, they would have to collaborate really closely & replicate what each other have found to the other person's setup. All that for a vanity, 1-person project?
Just another abstraction layer that makes it easier for everyone.
And I think that when you spend a significant amount of time watching videos on a certain subject or from a certain channel - or when you repeatedly decline to watch videos of a certain type when they are suggested - you are signaling a very clear preference.
Are the videos the algorithm serves up something that people will "derive lasting benefit, memory or happiness from"? Probably not - but I also don't think that's what most people are looking for from YouTube. Sometimes, maybe, but more often they are just looking for mindless entertainment. Engaging with media on a deeper level requires effort. YouTube is where people go when even finding something to watch on Netflix is too much effort, let alone doing something healthy.
To keep this all in context - the parent comment was complaining that the algorithm doesn't promote videos of a guy building bike jumps in his back yard enough. I like Berm Peak - but is that something that most people would "derive lasting benefit, memory or happiness from"? No, it's not.
Anyone who hasn't seen those videos hasn't lost out on very much. And for anyone who has spent any amount of time watching videos about bicycles on YouTube - they probably have been recommended Berm Peak videos on numerous occasions. I know I have. The guy has 2.77 million subscribers and 787 million total views on his videos. Whether or not people actually watched the videos when suggested is more likely a matter of personal choice than the algorithm doing him dirty.
Which means the person that put up 1 video with a massive amount of views will get squat (but Google will gladly put in ads and take a 100% cut).
Protip: subscribe to creators that post useful but not very subscribeable videos. Sucks for creators that put up videos that don’t really relate to eachother.
Dunno why everything has to be a “channel”. That’s what search is supposed to be for.
They must do this as a global level, not an individual level.
I've never noticed a single one of those awful algo-driven apps notice that I never watch short videos and in fact I often force quit the app the second they feed me trash I don't want to see.
And they keep doing it.
Why?
Never in my entire life have I ridden a flawless bicycle. Inevitably, small imperfections in the drive train creep in. A flawless bicycle isn't flawless for more than a few hundred miles. All it takes is one whack on a bike rack, one hurried toss, one oops where the bike falls over as I'm grabbing my gels from the pantry. And never mind actual crashes! Ever broken a derailleur hanger?
The fixie keeps going basically no matter what. A problem for the fixie is the kind of problem that sends me to the hospital. Which is to say, that the fixie can take a lot more abuse than I can. Does the drivetrain wear out? Sure! And it costs basically nothing to replace!
Personally I think any serious cyclist should have one. They are super fun to ride, robust, cheap to work on, and they make you stronger. What's not to like?
TL;DR: I'm warning against deeply problematic dependencies that only appear later on.
But there are ways to never be shown shorts. They just tend to require avoiding the YouTube app.
Remember the World Wide Web? Even here in 2026, YouTube is still just a website -- if you want it to be. Web browsers like Firefox can still be used to block whatever you don't want to see.
So an effective way to deal with this situation is to switch to a browser, block the shorts, and then cancel premium and block ads as well.
In this way: A person can still consume the content that they want, while also protesting with their wallet.
Hell, many times I launch YouTube and it immediately starts playing a short, no interaction required. And I have "show touches" on, so I know it's not a phantom tap or something, it's doing it all on its own.
YouTube pushes shorts insanely hard.
Luckily I use uBlock Origin and ReVanced, and I blocked all Shorts from even appearing.
But I subscribe now god damn it! Can’t I just only see what I want to see? Is this too much to ask?
I've also never watched a short, or if I did I immediately removed it from my watch history. I do keep that trimmed with prejudice, because the algorithm is desperate to show me something other than what I normally watch.
Why it happens with remove-animations: well I'm pretty confident they don't test with it. But it's super freakin' weird. I kinda doubt it'll get fixed though, doing so will cause "engagement" to drop, and it has been happening for most of a year now.